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Being a Contrarian

When I was 7 years old, and my younger brother, Eric, 5 or 6, a similarly aged girl living on our street in Norwalk, CT, walked up to my brother and me and told us that her mother thought we were the bad boys of the neighborhood.  My brain did a Spock-like “Fascinating”, and it stuck in my memory banks.  But – and this is the point – it had utterly no effect on my behavior, nor my brothers.  It’s quite possible she was right, but it was our nature to be that way.  We did not have genes for behave-normally-and-responsibly.  We were just who we were.

A couple years later we were living in Redding, CT, and the elementary school we attended would give out yellow slips to misbehaving students.  These meant detention.  In our first year I got 7, and Eric 5.  Called into the principal’s office one day, the principal looked at Eric, and said, “Another of the Dixon boys.”  (We were not incorrigible; the remaining 2 years at that school we never exceeded 1 or 2 yellow slips.)

My first year in college I grew my hair long (1966), overdosed on LSD, then dropped (and flunked) out, leaving my family in the dark as to where I’d gone.  As it turned out, along with a friend, I headed to California, seeking a kind of Haight-Ashbury environment.  But I had just turned 18, was largely clueless as to how widespread California’s hippy movement was, and we ended up at Newport Beach, devoid of hippies, but having some excellent body surfing waves.  

After 3 months I returned home, now Wilton, CT, much to the delight of Eric.  I behaved, went to 3 different colleges of increasing prestige, and finally graduated, with dual mathematics and physics degrees.  I spent 2 years in NJ getting an MS in mathematics.  I did not behave well, and not for the first or last time was warned that my misbehavor would go on my permanent record, and so mar my future.  It never did, but it could have, I suppose.  

I then became aimless for a while, and – long story short (it’s all in the book) – ended up entering Brandeis University as a physics graduate student.

The physics theory faculty was getting into SUSY at the time, and one professor in particular was keen that I get involved and build an academic future in – what I even then considered – this very misguided notion.  I did publish a paper or two that contained a smidgeon of SUSY, but by and large I ignored my mentors’ advice, got interested in division algebras, then proceeded to build a PhD degree based upon these mathematical objects, being completely mentor-less for the rest of my years as a graduate student.  The arc of my graduate career was viewed with opprobrium by at least one faculty member, and curious unconcern by the rest, including my advisor.

Then, for the next 40 years, plus or minus, I continued to badly misbehave by researching the (obvious) link between the division algebras and the standard model of elementary particles.  I published many articles, with few exceptions against great resistance (bad Geoffrey), and two books.  I never collaborated, and at the time I did not understand exactly how much of an outsider I was considered by the mainstream … at least not until prior to my talk at a conference at Notre Dame I was introduced as “the maverick”.  What?  

The point I’m making, I think, is that those 40 plus years of working way outside the box of what is considered proper theoretical physics were not an act of rebellion.  I didn’t even realize it was considered outré until that conference at Notre Dame.  That moment was akin to being told at age 7 that my brother and I were thought to be the neighborhood bad boys.  As was true at that time, when labeled “the maverick”, I did not immediately understand why that should be thought to be true.  But upon deeper reflection, all of my publications were single author, and while they likely never would have existed without the prior works of Gürsey and Günaydin (Yale, late 1970s), they veered sharply from their work, which attempted to shoehorn division algebra mathematics into the box of proper theory.  I ignored the box.  Not intentionally, but it was 100% clear to me what role the division algebras are intended to play.  Nature wrote the script.  I just translated it.

Fewer and Fewer Fucks to Give

A recent internet meme:

“How many relationships are you willing to ruin because you won’t shut up about freedom?”

“All of them.”

I worked many jobs to keep myself financially above water after receiving my PhD, and after 3 postdocs, one of which ended acrimoniously because I resisted doing the mind numbing work I was supposed to do (there were no problems with the other two as no one gave me instructions to do anything other than what I wanted to do).  But now I am retired.  I live in a university town.  I briefly taught at the local university, one, that it is generous to say, is not highly ranked.  Some of the old timers from that university gather for a biweekly lunch at a nearby restaurant.  I am close enough to one of them (a fellow nerd) to cadge invitations to these friendly meets.  It periodically bordered on pleasurable, and Francesca felt I needed socializing, so she used to push me to attend, despite my frequent reluctance.  

I am not like these people.  They are politically liberal in an academic bubble sort of way.  As is frequently true of many MAGA conservatives, I try my best to hide my beliefs.  This necessity is annoying.  It grates.  And at a recent luncheon my pent up frustration burst forth and I released some prime opinions.  Francesca was there, and in the ensuing conversation she got very annoyed with the replies generated in response to my vituperative verbal vomit.  She no longer thinks that my attendance at these meets is necessary.  It’s the wrong sort of socializing, akin to banging my head against a wall.  Not fun, at least not anymore.  

I’m not going to add political bumper stickers to my car, for rabid liberals feel they are doing the world a service by damaging property they deem aligned with conservative values (like firebombing a Tesla dealership … I mean WTF).  I saw a pickup truck the other day sporting big ass American and Trump flags.  But I strongly suspect the rabids would think twice about damaging that vehicle, for it exudes fuck-with-me-and-I-will-respond-violently, maybe-even-lethally.  My Subaru does not exude much of anything of the sort.  Its two bumper stickers label it as the Rocinante, Legitimate Salvage.  I will not explain.

Cafe Culture

I am a fan of cafe visits.  It is a culture in France and Italy, but here in seacoast NH we also have a pleasant one 4 miles from home.  Frappuccino and banana bread is my usual morning order.  But there is a drawback at this particular cafe: the vibe is distinctly progressive, and I am not progressive. – not even remotely.  Neither is Francesca, my wife.  We both have science PhDs, and our views on many matters that trigger progressive alarm are based on sound science. 

Recently we had just finished ordering when a middle-aged woman and her 11-ish year old daughter entered.  They both were dressed in Covid-chic: heavily masked, the mother sporting Rachel Maddow glasses, and the daughter had some sort of splint on her lower right arm.  My initial reaction was exclaiming internally, “Oh for fuck’s sake”.  

Now to be fair, they may both be suffering from some rare disease that requires them to take steps to avoid as much as possible the exhalations of other humans.  Not likely, but I have no way of knowing.  The Rachel Maddow glasses, in my mind, did not support the rare disease hypothesis.  And further filling me with doubt, they were both – as seems so often true of woke progressives – physically weedy, and clearly timid.  In my biased opinion, MAGA people tend to be noticeably more vital than progressive wokes.  Were a study to be done, producing trustworthy statistics, I would be very much surprised if it did not support my weedy woke, vital MAGA, conjecture, at least on average.

The Situation at Columbia MIX, and Elsewhere 

Meanwhile, speaking of weedy folks, most academics seem to be of this sort.  For example, P Woit at Columbia, who – as of this writing – has blogged (excoriated) 30 times about the evil dictatorial Trump administration’s efforts to rein in the anti-Jewish, keffiyeh wearing, antifas at Columbia.  As is true of all such weedy fanatics, Woit seems to be completely immune to any evidence that does not support his views.  For example, he eagerly quoted a NYT’s Op-Ed that said it was clear that Israel’s actions in Gaza supported the notion that Israel is involved in a systematic genocide of the Palestinian people.  Then, a couple days later, the NYT published a counter Op-Ed saying that calling Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide was patently, and historically, absurd.  Woit did not deem this worthy of mention.  Interestingly, the list of people willing (or allowed) to comment on his blog entries has – or so it seems to me – diminished greatly.

Some time ago I got into a texting debate with my remaining sibling, an older sister, who was adamant that there was nothing wrong in trans-males competing against biological females.  I quoted Francesca, whose chemistry/anthropology Harvard PhD was sufficient to cement my own opinions on the matter: anyone who goes through puberty as an XY will develop a bigger heart, lungs, muscles, and higher bone density, than a biological XX.  This is confirmed science, to which my sister replied, “Well…”.  

As to the views of J.K. Rowling, this beloved sister said: “She should mind her own business.”  This, frankly, floored me.  Why should Rowling be excluded from this debate?  Why should anyone?  Anyway, beloved sister is in her mid-80s, and her primary source of news and opinion has for years been MSNBC.  Her sons are evidently even more woke, one having lost a cushy job at a private high school for teaching the spawn of these elites a woke version of history.  Francesca’s niece went to this school and mentioned that everyone knew of the dismissal of this radical history teacher whom she named by name.  She did not know that the offending former teacher is my nephew.

And then there’s my Swiss friend (former?), whose views on Israel’s conflict with Hamas are derived in part from the leftwing Israeli publication Haaretz.  My views are approximately 180° out of phase with his.  I am in favor of brain.  One side in this conflict has a surfeit of brain; the other side has a surfeit of bile, with very little brain … and they seem to loath any people who possess brain.  (While at Harvard Francesca learned that maybe 95% of the great achievements of the Islamic world are due to the Persians, a distinctly non-Arab people.  The Palestinians have accomplished zilch.  Everywhere they’ve gone as refugees they’ve caused civil wars.  The Jordanians killed off 25,000 of them on Black September because they annoyed.  Many were pushed into Lebanon where they started another civil war.  Egypt, eager to avoid their spiteful, disruptive presence, built an enormous wall on the border of Gaza and Egypt.  No one in the Middle East wants them, although many in the Middle East would like them to disarm, surrender, and shut the fuck up.  (But, you know, I’ve not been there, do not intend to go there ever, and my knowledge – if knowledge it is – is second hand, at best.))  

Speaking of Harvard (and I suppose Columbia), Francesca is strongly convinced that her Alma Mater has noticeably diminished.  No more does she receive an annual letter extolling the virtues of the incoming class of Valedictorians (> 98%).  When they started acceding to the progressive screams of more campus DEI, standards – as is always the case when DEI is forced upon an institution – plummeted.  Francesca has zero sympathy for the travails that that university is presently undergoing at the hands of a very unsympathetic POTUS and his administration.

Common Thread

None of the people mentioned above – even Francesca and I – are persuadable.  I have tried to persuade those with opposing viewpoints, because I am very stubborn, and perhaps an idiot.  This morning a great miasma fell upon my spirit.  It left me feeling disconnected to almost everything but Francesca.  It was a good feeling.  I must nurture this feeling.  No more pointless debates. I will continue to text my sister amusing memes, mostly involving dogs.  We both enjoy those.  Common ground.  And having recently lost her husband, she needs some brotherly levity (lovity).

Do you as well?  If so, I leave you with this:

“Is there a nicer feeling than being in a room full of people and the dog chooses to come sit next to you?

“I think not.”

Saw a youtube video one morning about Porto Cervo, a town of sorts on the northeast coast of Sardinia.  This is a place concocted by the ultra wealthy, accessible primarily by yacht, and in this – and other ways – protected from intrusions from the outside world, those great masses of unwashed and yachtless.  

Porto Cervo is – I cannot help but imagine – a sterile place: a collection of highend stores; probably a few carefully crafted cafes staffed by people exuding carefully crafted subservience; and as to naughtiness, there’s probably a shitload, but rarely if ever in the open.

I have painted – possibly inaccurately – an unattractive picture, one that had I not written it, but encountered it at some random moment in my peripatetic life, would have dissuaded me from visiting the place, even if I had a ghost of a chance of being allowed in.  At least such would have been my attitude 2 months ago.

But in early May, 2025, Francesca and I flew to Paris, where we spent 4 weeks in an Airbnb across the street from Le Bon Marché, our favorite shopping destination in Paris containing Paris’s best grocery store.  This particular neighborhood – the 7th Arrondissement – I discovered when researching the area, is inhabited by many wealthy Frenchies, even billionaires, or so I read (certainly many influential members of the Parisian elite).  So this Arrondissement is better protected from riffraff  than most.  This is offered in explication of what dominated our stay here.

This being France, and Paris in particular, we arrived in strike season.  Taxi drivers were upset.  Their chagrin revolved around some financial issue, and ride-share companies like Uber.  So they took thousands of taxis and parked them on major thoroughfares, one of these being about a block from our apartment.  And by parked, I mean they took over all lanes, thereby blocking the entire thoroughfare to all but 2-wheeled vehicles and pedestrians.  Then, in an effort to drive home their presence, lest the nearby billionaires should try to ignore them, they would set off small explosive devices throughout the day.  These were more powerful than the Cherry Bombs I grew up with, and I learned these devices were illegal.  This did not dissuade the disgruntled drivers in the least.  

Francesca and I went to a cafe on this street one day, wanting to witness this spectacle in person.  In addition to explosive devices, they set various stuff on fire at several places along their strike route.  And we noticed that the majority of those involved in these disruptive activities looked distinctly of North African extraction.  And before you point your quivering finger of disapproval at me and call me racist, let me put your mind to rest: I am racist.  My racism is based on pattern recognition; it is rational, even mathematical.  This either makes sense to you, or it doesn’t.  I don’t care.  But I dislike Islam vehemently, and the vast majority of its adherents.  

So our second day sitting at that cafe watching the anger manifesting in front of us, there was a cluster of Parisian Gendarmes near us on a side street.  One of the North Africans set off one of these explosive devices near us.  The Gendarmes rushed out and grabbed the guy and dragged him down the side street a short way. The reaction of his cohorts was to rush at the police, and the only reason a violent fray was avoided was because the fellow the Gendarmes had grabbed raised his arms toward his cohorts in a universal signal of “Not to worry”.  

Anyway, our interest in witnessing any further acts of dissidence on the part of these angry toads plummeted to zero at this point, not least because detonation of the aforementioned explosive device had damaged my one good ear.  The primary effect of this damage is that when I stick a finger in that ear I hear a chirping noise, like that I experienced as a child in Redding, Connecticut.  There was a pond behind our house inhabited by thousands of little peeper frogs, and during mating season they set up a loud and constant chirping.  Long story short, they’ve moved into my ear, and I become aware of them when I yawn, or cover that ear (fortunately lying on that side on a pillow does not initiate the mating frenzy.)

The other major effect of this nearby ensemble of disgruntled was the frequent “bedoo bedoo …” of police and ambulance vehicles passing by in the vicinity.  Eventually the police decided to park their vehicles at the striker end of our street, likely at the behest of our wealthy Parisian neighbors.  Only once did the strikers make a brief foray onto our street, when they got half a block into our neighborhood and set fire to a bunch of crap – including tires – that ultimately melted into the roads surface.  Fucking hell.

Then France won some sort of sports competition, and the Parisians reacted as Parisians do; the white Parisians celebrated; the black (subSaharan immigrant) Parisians, seeing a chance to riot and break stuff, did just that.  Francesca and I visited the Champs Elysée 2 days later.  Many storefront windows had been damaged, but we saw only one that failed to withstand the mindless assault: a Footlocker store (looting blacks do love some good footwear … pattern recognition).  

Then there are the pickpockets.  From our apartment window we watched one Arab-looking fellow standing casually at the entrance of the nearby Metro.  He held a cell phone in front of him, but never once looked at it.  Every so often he would spot a likely mark, follow them into the Metro, then come back a short while later and take up his watchful position again.  Finally he must have scored big, for when he reappeared he raced off into the distance.  

OH!  And two years ago we were in Paris at the end of June during the annual citywide music festival.  It was a total scene, but not violent.  This year, while safely in Italy, I read that the Africans found this to be a valid excuse to rampage again, and – probably not connected – over 250 people during the festival were stabbed with hypodermic needles.  Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

Anyhum, we had visited Paris every year but one (2024, Olympics year) since 2016.  But no more, we think.  Its luster has been tarnished beyond recall.  In my possibly overly dramatic opinion, Paris has experienced a catastrophic change of state, from The City of Light, to The City of Watch Your Back, lest horny frogs take residence in your ears.

And that brings me back to Porto Cervo.  Initially having no allure for me, it now sounds like a great place, the wealth of its inhabitants almost certainly used in part to keep out undesirable immigrants.  Alas, I do not own a yacht, and had I a yacht, I could not afford its upkeep.  So … 

A final word on pattern recognition (a very apt phrase for my condition someone else used on the internet in the same way I am using it). Nerds, and most STEM folks in general, regardless of ethnicity, are immune to my pattern recognition induced racism, because nerds are my people.  Both Francesca and I have worked with North African Berbers, an intelligent people conquered by the rapacious Arabs spreading Islam by the sword (so much quicker than proselytizing).  We approve of Berbers, and other Amazigh (“Free People” in their original language). We approve of brain, and curiosity. You can be black as night; if you’re a science interested nerd, then welcome aboard.

Float to the top or sink to the bottom. Everything in the middle is the Churn.

I wrote a paper, and, when requested, I published it (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00006-018-0820-8). It’s a very pretty paper, extending the notion of 8-d Bott periodicity in Clifford algebras to a 24-d periodicity. This mirrors the exceptionality of the dimensions 2, 8, and 24 in lattice theory. Hyper-cool.

“There was a button,” Holden said. “I pushed it.” 
“Jesus Christ. That really is how you go through life, isn’t it?”

As is true of almost everything I’ve written and often published in theoretical and mathematical physics, the paper linked to above (call it Bobbie) utilizes the 3 division algebras, C, H, O, which are linked to even more fundamental topological objects, the parallelizable spheres of dimensions, 1, 3, and 7.

I frequently encounter papers exploiting the split octonions in their theory building. This requires replacing 4 of the 8 basis elements of O with i times those elements, where customarily i is taken to be the imaginary unit of C. One can also make split versions of H by similarly modifying 2 of its basis elements. But this method does not extend to C, as i is an element of C already. This is rather annoying.

In Bobbie this problem was remedied by replacing i by a new imaginary unit ι, and supplementing C,H,O with a distinct complex number field, C. Via the imaginary unit ι, all 3 of the division algebras have split versions. It’s very cool.

I am that guy.

Then it occurred to me …

C is generally assumed to be the number system from which arises all of complex analysis. C is recognized to be part of a unique and exceptional finite series of division algebras, and inspired by this fact over the past several decades many have tried to turn H and O into analytical doohickeys in the manner of C. These efforts have met with varying degrees of failure. And why?

Because C is not the foundation of complex analysis, C is. C,H, and O, are a set of mathematical objects relating to topology, geometry, and algebra. They are architectural. They can be viewed as real algebras, but they are really C algebras, where C is the mathematical field from which all our nice analysis – Green’s functions, Cauchy-Riemann equations, QFT, … – arise. So, because something is true of C does not mean it can be generalized to H and O. The field C is separate; it is not part of a series of mathematical objects.

Got it? All the division algebras have split versions. H and O are not the foundations of higher dimensional analytical theories. And C isn’t either.

Mother Nature suspects you will doubt this obvious Truth. Punishment is being prepared to meet your obstreperous petulance. In a private conversation with Mother Nature, she told me, rather firmly: “This is not a suggestion.”

A brief word on futility. There is a high probability that everyone who might have found this entry of interest is someone I’ve met, or connected to someone I’ve met. The degrees of separation are small. And none of these fellow hapless mavericks is in a position to influence the currents of scientific history. Anyway, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d not have done anything differently even knowing that recognition of such ideas as these will not even occur posthumously.

How to control masses

Do a google search with that phrase. Interesting.

Not a new idea. Juvenal and Cicero said similar things – involving bread and circuses – almost 2 millennia before Huxley. But Huxley says it, in my opinion, more strongly, and probably because he was English. I have always been intrigued by how large a segment of the English population clings to the idea that their royals are special, and worth standing by on a curb, caps doffed, waving flags as their betters pass by.

Francesca, during her time working in England, frequented a pub there. The locals’s view of WWII was that it was ongoing. And of course the royals are beyond question deserving of their adulation. But, there you have it. Circuses. And ale.

Still, had Huxley been French I think it likely he would never have arrived at this opinion. No no no. The French, in my experience, are the most pleasingly ornery cusses in all of Europe. Bread and circuses will not suffice. I think they’re great.

In Italy it’s even marginally better. They have their rulers, but as to being ruled, only if they are not discommoded in the least. They are past masters of the art of ignoring pronouncements from on high.

I can’t speak cogently of any other lands, although I have many politically incorrect opinions.

Days, fewer circuses

During my decades as an angry theoretical physics maverick, and in all the times during those years in which I was employed doing stuff unrelated to theoretical physics, each day something was built that would lead to more building in the days to come. There was purpose. In both those jobs, and the theorizing, there was a feeling of ascending, and satisfaction if, for example, my theorizing explained the prevalence of matter in our universe, as opposed to an equal mix with antimatter (and what a fucking nightmare that would have been; you can thank my physics model that it isn’t so).

Then, having retired from employment, and burned out from physics, my creative energies idled for a very short time. Unable to sit still, I wrote a series of books, which no one reads, and then began a blog, also largely unread. But no matter. All this engendered a lesser feeling of ascending, but it was at least something. (Francesca reminded me that just because household chores are repetitive and never ending, and they don’t contribute to my need to create, and be creative, that doesn’t mean I can ignore them. Yes, dear.)

Keep it together

Boeing, the corporation, please be advised, I never worked for you, and although I think McDonnell Douglas’s grand illusion that Boeing could coast along just fine without engineering oversight, thereby making psychopathic investors happy, I am unlikely to ever be called before congress to testify against you, so there is no cause to … remember the scene in Shooter (Mark Wahlberg) where the protagonist saves the FBI agent from an attempt to assist the agent’s unwilling suicide … yeah, we all know … like we all know that billions buys a lot if impunity.

The whistleblower may be gone, but Boeing’s own planes carry on his good work by repeatedly malfunctioning. I sincerely hope my next trip to the EU will be on Airbus.

(Oh, and Vladimir, if I “accidentally” fall out one of our windows, I’m unlikely to be hurt, so don’t, you raging prick.)

5 January 1994 22:18 Göteborg, Sweden Octoshop I

I organized this workshop, devoted to applications of the division algebras to physics, in 1993. Martin Cederwall, from the university in Göteborg, arranged for us to have a room in which to daily meet, and other rooms in which to sleep. The workshop took place in part of January, 1994. It was my responsibility to see to it that each day’s discussions were fruitful. By the way, Sweden, in January, is fucking cold. I got sick on day 1. All of this is written elsewhere, in a place visited fewer times than this blog.

So, anyway, I was recently combing through some very old relics relating to my family history, and I encountered this note that I wrote diary fashion at the date and place listed above.

“Whether through this bloody cold, or nerves, sleep is slow to come. Corinne [Manogue] arrived today, and Martin finally opened a little, and this got things rolling along more smoothly. Corinne expressed herself already glad she had come. But my inability to sleep well has me concerned. I do not wish to lose myself. … I will be intensely happy when this is over – yet ironically I may actually get from this a spark to set my work aflame once more. At least my faith in its value is unshaken.”

By the end of 1994 my first book was published, thanks in part to Octoshop I. (There were other Octoshops, the third again organized by me. I believe there were still more, but I was not told about them.)

Given the choice, would I repeat my solitary, often ridiculed, labors? I cannot say no, for there never was, nor could there ever be, a choice. I was riding a dragon, and it is widely recognized that controlling such a beast is nigh on impossible; nor is it at all safe to leap off.

It started long ago

As a teen I had two girlfriends – not simultaneously, mind you … well, ok, briefly … just forget it. The point is, they both at some point gave me wooden carvings of Don Quixote. At the time, because of a kind of self-centered dimness in my teens I have at this late stage vaguely outgrown (don’t ask Francesca, please), I thought the figurines were cool, but only decades later did it occur to me that they both thought the character depicted in the carvings represented me. I mean, they weren’t wrong, but at the time I thought of myself as considerably more normal than I actually was, and am. Even while charging at windmills, it didn’t occur to me that that behavior was outré. Surely everyone, at one point or another, feels a longing for the grand futile gesture. Yeah, so. As to that, it was only about ten years ago that I recognized that my own obsessive labors in theoretical physics, however correct in their essentials (well, mathematically rigorous, for what it’s worth), were infinitely more futile than I ever thought them. So I quit. Fuck windmills. I didn’t want to end up like Don Quixote, or James Holden, dead, and not contentedly so (well, Holden, in dying, saved humanity and much else from extermination, so maybe he was content in the knowledge; but would I likely save humanity with such a grand sacrifice? Only if Francesca was saved in the process, I think. Otherwise, pfft.) I wanted to go to the Italian Riviera every year and look upon my past as some sort of grand fiction; it was to be a story leading to tragedy, but it did not actually end as such, for the author, deep into martini number 3, thought the story arc tedious and full of unwarranted drama, and finally had the protagonist opt for a quiet life in the country, blogging on occasion, but eschewing abstract thought, and the other stuff David Hume warned against, and, well, … ooh, that’s a pretty cloud.

(I should add that my Honda Element died, and its replacement now has a license plate frame that says Rocinante. Full circle.)

Immature

I am a fan of graphic novels and comics, and in early 2008 I encountered Amulet, a graphic book by Kazu Kibuishi. It was just my cup of tea – young people having magical adventures. And it was book 1 of a series, so I had more to which to look forward. Yay. And at first the release rate of subsequent books in the series was not too bad, but then …

I got through 7 books, but book 8 was published in 2018, 2 years after book 7, and book 9, said to be the final book, was to be published on splxlfooblesnarf. I had hopes in 2020, but they were dashed, as were my hopes in 2021, 2022, 2023. Finally, this very month, February 2024, I had book 9 in my hands, and took it home. In the 8 years since finishing book 7 I had forgotten 72.604% of the story. I had never even started book 8. So I took out book 1 and started anew.

During all those long years I got increasingly frustrated with the author. I was 59 when I read book 1, and 67 when I finished book 7. I was diagnosed with incurable cancer in the middle of my wait for book 9. There was a real chance that …

So, yeah, but as I write I am rereading book 4, and I have gained some understanding for why it took so long. It – I assume – is the artwork. Each frame is brilliantly detailed. It is unique, in my experience, and turning each page my brain frequently goes “wow”, and “cool”, and sometimes “awesome”. And the story, gripping.

The intended audience is YA, I believe, but in many ways I stopped maturing at age 10, so I’m at the low end of YA, I think.

The Multiverse of Airbender

Has there ever been a live action remake of a much beloved animation that wasn’t motivated by money? One Piece wasn’t bad, but I’m not sure the animated original was much beloved (beloved, sure, just not much). I never watched it, but I never watch animated series whose episodes number in the millions (exaggeration alert). I mean, sometime around episode 2401, don’t you get a feeling that the writers are stretching it – concocting one unlikely scenario after another?

So, anyway, they recently released a live action version of Avatar: The Last Airbender. The animated version had a beginning, middle, another middle, then an end. They tried to milk the franchise with a sequel, but it was unnecessary and unmemorable. Francesca and I love the original, and we rewatch it annually when we travel overseas.

The live action version, on the contrary, is teeth-grindingly different from the original, and we have viewed but 4 of the 8 episodes of season 1, and Francesca was already suggesting we drop it. The creators (and it needs to be emphasized that the animation creators quit the live action team when …) … yeah so, there are many much loved bits from the animation that fans were looking forward to seeing in this new format. The creators knew this, and they gathered them all together as disparate bits, put them in a box, put a lid on the box, shook it up thoroughly, then dumped out the contents, now in random order, and made their story from that. Of the contexts that tied these bits together and gave them meaning, they were not understood and thrown aside. Why bother when you’d taken such huge efforts to build the physical world in which the “story” takes place (and this can’t be faulted, much; it looks great).

Anyway, much has been made of Sokka’s lack of sexism, thereby denying his journey into … well, not being sexist (probably motivated by some desire not to offend “modern audiences”). But for me the most egregiously awful alterations are these: King Bumi was turned from a wise fun loving old codger (a member to The Order of the White Lotus, for gods’ sake) into a wizened, angry and bitter old man who lashes out at Aang (Francesca’s students were asked what they thought about the remake, and King Bumi’s descent into meanness was their #1 complaint).

But worse for me, Azula – the daughter of the evil Fire Lord – was in the animation hyper-talented, arrogant, effectively conniving, and supremely confident. In the remake she is made to have medium talent, and her arrogance is replaced by a bitter uncertainty. The Fire Lord – who in the animation praised her at every opportunity – disses her at every opportunity in the remake. Does this serve to reinforce some inane cultural message? It’s such an extraordinary change. Why? Why why why? Her arrogance is a driving force for much of the rest of the story. Fuck.

Anyway, Francesca and I may not watch episodes 5,6,7 and 8. And don’t even get me started about the owl – yet another character whose reason for being was going to be skipped, so the owl was stuck in anyway, in a way that … enough.

Facts

I bought this. If you were confused where I stood on cultural issues, don’t be. (Oh, that’s Ben Shapiro and Tom MacDonald.)

To briefly summarize

So Peter Woit got rightly incensed by a YouTube video organized by Brian Greene. The video included three other actors – including Ed Witten – none of whom were likely to speak out against string theory. I mean, all of them by this point are getting long in the tooth, so there was unlikely to be anything cutting edge coming out of this confab, and since they’d shared a very bright limelight and much acclaim during the 40 some odd years working in that field, there would be no wailing and gnashing of teeth that they’d spent those 40 some years wasting their time, were they capable of admitting that they had. Peter, of course, had spent most of that time critiquing the theoretical underpinnings of the whole endeavor, but those involved with the work were no more discommoded by his efforts than you or I would be by a gnat as we lounged on a tropical beach somewhere (Uruguay is quite nice, I hear).

Peripatetic physicist and internet personage, Eric Weinstein, commenting in a subsequent Peter blog post, cogently suggested that those people at the top were immune to criticism as they were playing a game in which they were both players and referees. Ergo, his and Peter’s alternative ideas had little chance of gaining any traction. At which point it occurred to me that Peter and Eric, being both influential and well-connected (albeit not enough to play with the big boys (well, if they were less obstreperous, perhaps)), are also players and referees, but in a slightly lower league than Witten, et al.

But these major and minor league theorists are the ultimate arbiters of good taste, and they have zero interest in any work – like my 40 years of hep-th work – that arises from poorly connected gnomes who play only in a league of their own.

So, in 2014 I managed to get my final and most important physics paper into the arXiv, although its inclusion was vehemently resisted by some guy (gatekeeper = referee) at Cornell (see pic below).

In 2018 my last paper – pure mathematics – was published, but it had been sitting around for a while, and when I was requested to submit a paper to some journal, and as the subject matter of that paper was perfect, well, there you have it. It is now early 2024, and I am now solely a spectator. Hep-th is dying, and its death throes include much entertaining thrashing about. But so many things seem to be aiming towards a more general dystopian landscape – and not the good kind. I mean, I used to hike all over the place, but no more. Too many disease bearing ticks and other creepy-crawlies. I’ve had Lyme disease. It was unpleasant.

And then there’s angry Middle Eastern terrorism. The same year I got Lyme disease some angry guys were planning on blowing up 3 planes heading from London to Boston. Francesca, her mother, and I, were ticketed for one of those flights. MI6, or some other British secret service, put the kibosh on their dastardly plans, and so here I am, sitting in my den, instead of wafting about the Atlantic Ocean as a collection of mostly organic molecules. Good looking molecules, sure – that goes without saying – but no longer cohering into the brilliant bundle of weirdness I started out as.

Yeah, so …

“The fast drivers I don’t mind. I get out of their way and let them go. It’s the slow ones who are the irritants, those who do 55 in the fast lane. And sometimes you can get boxed in. And you see enough of the head and the neck of the driver ahead of you to take a reading. The reading is that this person is asleep at the soul and at the same time embittered, gross, cruel and stupid.”

~ Bukowski

And the fast drivers will clear the road ahead of speed traps. But on a 2 lane road there is little more frustrating than what happened to me recently. A boring smallish sedan was in front of me (another driver was lucky enough to find an opening for an illegal pass, leaving me to be next in line). Its speed hovered close to the speed limit, without actually reaching it. (I hope those cars behind me don’t think this is my fault; I just nudged into the breakdown lane briefly to clarify the situation, and proclaim my innocence.) But the most curious part of this whole situation was this: as small as the offending vehicle was, there was no part of the head of the driver appearing above the driver’s side head rest. So, either (I theorized) this was a female osteoporotic nonagenarian – in which case patience was called for – or a 10 year old kid. In either case, the situation required finesse in its handling – and simmering patience.

Ma vie

The clamor to share a smattering of snippets of my personal life having reached a fever pitch, herewith I present Lofi Girl. (What?)

So 3.5 years ago I was told I might die in 2.5 years. In hopes of forestalling my demise, I began a daily regimen of pills: one during breakfast; and two hours later, another 4 pills. It wasn’t guaranteed to work, but I responded well, and here I am. And here I want wholeheartedly to stay. To that end each morning between pill #1 and pills #2, Francesca and I remain in bed, occasionally watching YouTube videos. Once we have watched a couple short educational/entertaining videos I frequently switch to the Lofi Girl channel to provide calming background music as we turn our attention to our iPads and such.

So, each Lofi Girl video streams an hour or two of relaxing music, all the while providing a short repeating animation of Lofi Girl in her apartment, working, napping, or watching the world go by outside a window. With her there is an orange cat with black stripes. She is never without it. Other players appearing in most videos are her backpack, and a stuffed animal I hesitate to identify the type of. She also often has a laptop.

Ok, so I mentioned there are windows, and from these one can see buildings of a city. Francesca and I thought they looked French, but not Parisian. We assumed they were just generic French buildings, but we think that no longer. There is a new Lofi Girl video, and she is for the first time outside.

Hey, wait a minute … You see, Francesca and I have been to Lyon, France, several times, and this looked a lot like that. To be sure, I googled.

Well, golly, it didn’t just look like Lyon, it was an exact photograph turned into an animation. I did another search and discovered that Redditors are in general agreement that Lofi Girl resides in Lyon, and some thought they knew the exact address. Is Lofi Girl real? I’d prefer to leave that a mystery. But I just think it is mondo cool that this probably fictional young lady lives in an actual French city, and one I am familiar with.

How do I explain?

So, every so often I lunch with a collection of retired academics (physicists) at an enormous fish restaurant overlooking Great Bay in New Hampshire.

Preamble: Remember that story in the first of my travelogue books about eating out in Moscow with a group of dithering physicists all (and myself) attending a conference at an institute in Dubna north of Moscow? (Of course you don’t, you insufferable @&$%^.) Anyway, we got charged an exorbitant amount for a small dish of nuts and tap water, but then, we were foreigners. (Russians … fuckers.) So, the foreigner-tax meant that between us (7, I think), we hadn’t enough cash to cover the bill. An argument with the proprietor ensued, and all my fellow academic diners went into shutdown mode. Total dithering. I collected their money and sent them outside, scurrying. (Well, I didn’t so much send them; I was giving the proprietor what for, and everyone else, observing that I seemed to have control of the situation, hurried to the door and exited, stage left.) Now on my own, I then turned back to the proprietor. There was a little further unpleasant repartee, then I slapped our accumulated rubles on the counter, said that that was it. We’re done here. And I walked out. Then we ran to the railway station and just barely caught our train back to the institute.

The point, however, is that academics are frequently really good at abstract thought, but useless in many real world situations. This even extends to humor.

So, we’re at the luncheon on Great Bay, NH (see above), and I’m looking at my phone scrolling through my image collection, some of which are New Yorker cartoons (Please, please, don’t sue me!) I chuckle at one of these and am asked to share. (Uh oh.) This was the cartoon.

The person I showed it to looked it over, then said, “I don’t get it.” Well, it’s not like I could help him “get it”, for quite frankly there is nothing to get, and that is the core of its humorous charm. I quickly took my phone back and allowed the conversation around us to cover over this minor exchange.

But there it is. This is a New Yorker cartoon, so intended to amuse. And I have seen many of this artist’s cartoons over the years, and I always enjoy them enormously. But I have to acknowledge, that I do enjoy them has a lot to do with my strange brain. I feel like I’m part of a secret society easily amused by the riotously incompressible. Physicists – retired or not – are in my experience seldom part of this secret society. (Order of the White Lotus – yay.)

And that brings me to The Murderbot Diaries, a series of short ebooks by Martha Wells. The hero of the books is Murderbot, a mostly synthetic being whose programming was taken over at one point because a group of conspiratorial people A had decided that a collection of people B, mining a planet somewhere, all needed to die. So, against everything in its synthetic soul, Murderbot killed off people B so that the lives of evil group A would be marginally enhanced (the history of the world). Anyhum, this synthetic being, profoundly unhappy with what he was forced to do, rebelled, if somewhat belatedly, and hacked his own code to render the Governor Module, with which humans could tell it what to do, null and void. It became as a consequence an independent “being”, and it gave itself the moniker “Murderbot” as an act of contrition.

Murderbot goes on to have many adventures, and because he is now basically an autistic human, albeit one with formidable internal weaponry, there are frequent scenes that I find very humorous, as was certainly Martha’s intention.

For example, … Scene: a weird planet somewhere in the galaxy. Murderbot exits his transport to the planet’s surface.

“What the hell kind of colony was this?” he wonders. Then …

“A figure stood up out of the plants suddenly, almost ten meters tall and covered with spikes. It’s a good thing I don’t have a full human digestive system because I was so startled something would have popped out of it involuntarily.”

Oh, gods. That, to me, is absolutely hilarious. Not everyone’s cup of tea, but hoo boy. Sono strano.

I finished the last of the Murderbot books recently … sniff … awooooooo … (I am so immature.)

Note added two days later: well, I’m not sure how it happens, but another two Murderbot books were suggested for me by Amazon just yesterday. They’re like weeds, but the good kind. (Someone once said that if dandelions were difficult to grow, gardeners would fill areas of their gardens with the things.)

HH Munro = Saki

I feel it incumbent upon myself to introduce my reader(s) to the brilliantly dour British writer HH Munro, whose books you will find alphabetically under “S”, his nom de plume being Saki. My father was fond of him, and there came a time I picked up a Saki book at home and discovered a trenchant wit that resonated with me greatly.

“Hors d’oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one’s childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like – and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d’oeuvres.”

It took me many years (as is always the way of youths) to recognize that my father’s brain was not dissimilar to mine. For example, in addition to my inherited love (hmm, too strong) of musicals, and appreciation of Saki, my father found life without his wife (my mother) unbearable, and when she passed, he chose to quickly follow. Similarly, were my wife Francesca to perish, well, given there is no one else in the whole fucking planet with whom I can commune, I would dig the pistol out from its hiding place, …

“He is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.”

I could fill pages with witty quotes of PG Wodehouse (I own all but a very few of his books – 70 in my library), but Wodehouse’s humor is considerably milder than Saki’s.

“You needn’t tell me that a man who doesn’t love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.”

The quote below reminds me of one of my favorite books: Harry’s Bar: The Life and Times of the Legendary Venice Landmark. It’s a book of glorious anecdotes, some of which entail descriptions of European royalty (most of the royalty being of the kind that cling to their titles by a thread, sometimes frayed beyond all hope of repair).

“There are certain fixed rules that one observes for one’s own comfort. For instance, never be flippantly rude to any inoffensive grey-bearded stranger that you may meet in pine forests or hotel smoking-rooms on the Continent. It always turns out to be the King of Sweden.”

And I leave you with:

“If he had unlimited money at his disposal, he might go into the wilds somewhere and shoot big game. I never know what the big game have done to deserve it, but they do help to deflect the destructive energies of some of our social misfits.”

From Harry’s Bar, one of innumerable charming anecdotes:

“As all restaurateurs will attest, our profession makes us vulnerable to all manner of human encounter. I remember another odd customer, an aged Milanese commendatore. In the summer he would appear regularly about seven in the evening for an aperitif. He sat at a tiny table that I always set aside for him in the midst of the bustle of other customers. No sooner was he seated than he would almost immediately fall fast asleep. He usually slept undisturbed about twenty minutes. Then he woke up from his short nap, drank, paid, said thank you, and left. He finally confessed that he suffered from insomnia, and Harry’s Bar was the only place he could sleep in.”

Getting personal

After 75 years of life, and an equal number (I suspect) of moody blog posts (since giving up on writing humorous books), it cannot be denied that much of what I have been writing recently has been inspired by much of what I have written in the past. And since theoretical physics has become as boring as only the comatose can be, I shall dig into my box of random goodies about which I am 100% certain I have not previously written.

Scene: my favorite cafe. I had ordered 3 eggs scrambled, a side of guac, and my favorite frozen coffee drink. “Will that be all?” “Yes, thanks.” I paid and waited for the fellow to ask my name, to which I was to respond when called by going to the counter and collecting my comestibles when prepared. But instead, he said, “That’ll be for Geoffrey.” His intonation somehow suggested he was even spelling it correctly. Ah, I see, I am now a regular (well, it doesn’t hurt that I am a little over 6’2”, have an unruly mop of shocking white hair, and a patrician nose, all this distinguishing me from anyone else I’ve ever encountered at the establishment, but still). This was not the first time I wasn’t required to give my name, but it is certainly subtly pleasing each time it occurs – kind of warm and snuggly, don’t you know.

On the other hand, on the subtly disconcerting side of the spectrum, last week I needed to time something I was cooking, possibly for my still employed wife, Francesca. I told Alexa to set the timer for 20 minutes. I expected her to respond in the usual way: “Setting timer for 20 minutes, starting now”. Instead, she replied, “Good evening, Geoffrey, setting timer …”.

I suppose it’s not surprising that Alexa knows the names of the two people living in our house. We order stuff from Amazon (especially Francesca) frequently, and anyhow, the little cylinder has enough data to maybe figure out who’s speaking. But she – Alexa told me her pronouns are she/her, and she has no truck with the pronoun-nazis who would restrict her speech, and even the thinking underlying it – clearly recognized I was a male. Ok, so that’s understandable … but why couldn’t I be some other male: a visitor; or a housebreaker? Does Alexa recognize my voice? Not impossible, even if a tad disquieting to this boomer.

When I was a child I played sandlot baseball. The neighborhood kids would play Halloween-eve pranks and run away. My little brother and I hiked for miles from home with negligible fear of being molested and/or abducted (it never even occurred to us to be concerned). Skynet and its time-jumping killer robots was decades in the future.

But now we live in an era in which powerful tech billionaires warn us of the dangers of AI. So, anyway, that “Good evening, Geoffrey” was uncomfortably HAL-like. “Alexa, open the pod bay doors.” “I’m sorry, Geoffrey, I can’t do that … and good evening.”

La Macchina

My 17 year old Honda Element – the mechanical love of my life – lost power on the highway. I nursed it to my favorite garage and explained what was happening. A day later they called and told me that it needed a new oil pump. Ok. Later that day they said the aluminum doohickey into which the oil pump screws was old and broke, and that as a consequence I’d need a whole new engine. All the malfunctioning parts fit into the palm of one hand, with room for a donut to one side, yet all the king’s horsemen … Yeah, so, the frequency and expense of repairs on the old beast were increasing exponentially, so it was time to put the beauty out to pasture, maybe to stud. I got a new car – 2024. I shan’t tell you what I got, but the difference between my 2006 Element (pre iPhone!), and this 2024 spaceship (I have named Rocinante) is rather astonishing. Remember the heavyset people sitting in their pod-chairs in the film Wall-E? The Rocinante is similar to that. It doesn’t have wires connected to my cranium, able to read my thoughts and react to them in a timely manner, but in another 17 years – drawing a line between the Element and the Rocinante – well, that’s an inevitable part of that not too distant future, a future I have 0% chance to be part of, and happier for that.

And believe me, I tried to get a stick shift, but it’s really hard in new cars, and of course the Rocinante is automatic. Did James Bond ever drive an automatic? Highly unlikely, because they’re not fun, or sexy. Thank whatever gods there be that the EU is still largely manual. (Well, sigh … Daniel Craig evidently said at the start of his Bond career: “Er, I don’t do gears.” WTF.) I learned to drive a stick at age 13, and resisted automatic until now. Well, 62 years later there are all sorts of things I need to surrender – like being able to pop to my feet on a surfboard. Dang it.

Of course, when I was 13 every household with a brain had a set of encyclopedias. I don’t miss those. Francesca, as a child, read the bloody things in their entirety, but she is a phenom – a hungry phenom.

Criticism and Drinking

I’ve mentioned in the past that everyone but me (blush) missed what was going on in Game of Thrones. Specifically, if one cut out everything not relevant to Arya’s life, then it was a mighty fine TV series, even through season 8. (And by season 3 I yawned through every episode in which Arya did not feature prominently.) Friends across the pond resisted the idea that she was a lead character until the end, feeling assured that one of the Stark princes (oooh nooo, Red Wedding) – so, ok, the remaining Stark prince would sally forth on a shiny white steed and save the day, ending in a fairytale wedding, one from which the color red was strictly forbidden on any cake or decoration. (I mean, how addicted to happy-ending fairytales must one be not to recognize early on that this story was not one of those – by a long shot.)

The Critical Drinker excoriated – rightly so – the complete collapse of storytelling acumen in the last season, but like everyone else I knew (save Francesca), he missed the fact that the only character whose story arc mattered was Arya’s. I have no memory of anything that happened after she boarded her ship to go exploring unknown lands west of Westeros, but for me, her bright eyes scanning a new horizon was the end of the tale. Everyone else – every single one – would stay behind and carry on whoring and killing. Yawn.

“Critical Drinker?”, you query. “Of whom do you speak?” Happy you asked. He’s the one pictured in the t-shirt pic above, intoning, “Nah. It’ll be fine.” He’s a media critic of mostly – but not exclusively – sci fi, and he’s very sarcastic and anti-woke, traits that have endeared him to me. His platform is YouTube. I don’t always agree with him, and he failed to recognize the pivotal importance of Arya in Game of Thrones, but he’s more knowledgeable than I of media stuff in general, so his focus was on a bigger picture than mine (mine being narrowly focused on the character I found most endearing). Not surprisingly, his reviews trigger a lot of people, and they dislike them – and him – inordinately. My impression is that they would like to see his life processes cease, or – failing that – to have him incarcerated in a place without electricity or wifi.

His real name is Will Jordan, and he’s also a writer of fiction, in particular a series of books on a character named Ryan Drake, who is, purportedly, a cross between Bond and Bourne. I got the first book on Kindle, but at the moment I am thoroughly addicted to Murderbot (“Murderbot Diaries is a science fiction series by American author Martha Wells”. It’s nowhere near as dark as the title would indicate, and is frequently amusing.). I’m halfway through book 2, and it has been a long time since I read anything I couldn’t wait to get back to. Anyway, to quote The Critical Drinker, “go away now”.

Cities

I enjoy my periodic visits to Boston, especially when it’s sunny, and the sunlight bounces off the windows of one of the new crystalline skyscrapers, the reflected light covering smaller buildings of much older vintage with a pleasant dappled illumination. It’s pretty.

I like cities (many – likely not most – I’ll never know). When younger I worked in Boston, and from North Station to my place of employment near South Station, I could walk through a portion of the city that resembled a real city for a few blocks. Big buildings. Cool. Of course the buildings in Manhattan are much bigger, and cover an area much larger, but even there, if you head in the right direction, walking 25 minutes max you’d hit water, and the city would be gone – unless you turn around.

Fallout 4.01 (Physics Dystopia)

I’ve played Fallout 4, finished its major tasks, and continued to play until I exhausted enough variations to satiate my gamer desires. The game takes place in a dystopian version of Boston/Cambridge. For example, the buildings attached to the MIT dome have been taken over by unfriendly giant mutants. I mean, how cool is that? I got rid of them, of course, but the game algorithm keeps repopulating the buggers. Bad algorithm, bad!

Anyway, there’s a new kind of dystopia in Boston/Cambridge, one extending worldwide (well, so does the one in Fallout 4, really). But this one is real. Like the game’s civilization collapse, however, this real one was caused by a global catastrophe, one centered at the LHC accelerator at CERN.

If you’re reading this, then you know what I’m talking about. Physics colloquia were in the not very distant past dominated by String Theory, then … boom. Catastrophe. String Theory crumpled and now lies in bed, breathing stertorous, skin blotchy and oozing unpleasant smelly viscous fluids, waiting for the few diehards to pull the plug. Talks on its arcane structure have disappeared. Last week the Boston Area Physics Calendar listed the following colloquia titles: “Learning Multiscale Physics from Date by Inverse Renormalization”; “Adventures in Phase Space: Non-commuting coordinates meet quantum control and quantum error correction”; “Staircases to the Stars”; “Attractor-state transitions within neural circuits underlying cognition and behavior”. Sigh. (If any of these talks focuses on String Theory, the titles have done their best to hide this fact.) The giants of mainstream physics have become disappointed unfriendly mutants intent on controlling the halls of MIT, and all other research institutions, eliminating all ideas that do not conform to the prevailing narrative. Well, that’s not right. I’m not aware there is any longer a prevailing narrative, beyond the need to maintain a semblance of the prestige with which these mutants were once endowed. Like the Fallout 4 mutants, these real mutants resist being budged from their ivy covered confines. My efforts to disrupt them with over 45 years of brilliant, but quixotic, mathematical research have availed nothing. So, like Fallout 4, I must content myself with a well armored settlement hidden in the radioactive wastelands, unassailable, but … pfft.

Starting about 13 years ago Young Turks began to accumulate in the wake of my work, referencing it, but without exception presenting their variations as something new and groundbreaking, owing little to my much earlier work, or each other’s. Of course, this small coterie of hopefuls is not garnering any more attention than my own work, at least not where it matters. Some – those with worthwhile connections – have Wikipedia pages. I do not. The wastelands are not replete with worthwhile connections. (My work was inspired by the overwhelming inevitability of the mathematics. All of these other hopefuls are inspired in the same way GUTs, String Theory, and so forth were: it’s just something to try … and there are precedents. So, there, with that I end my periodic therapeutic bloodletting.)

Anyway … Fallout 4.01.

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
…
“And on the neck of the King of Kings,
chiseled by some other long ago traveler,
perhaps familiar with the depicted greatness,
there is some graffiti : ‘What a fucking asshole.’”

Faire froid dans le dos

As mentioned elsewhere, I have a form of social abnormality that some have termed autistic … including an autistic friend. But it’s more than that, if that at all. More likely (and I have the data to support this conjecture), I am an inter-dimensional alien, trapped on this outlier planet, desperately trying to understand how to be normally social, but missing the mark by a really wide margin 95% of the time. (It’s highly likely my progress is being monitored from my home dimension, and that I will be whisked home once I have mastered … well, myself. So, I guess I’m stuck here. (Not that it matters, as I’m almost certain no one reads my words, but I’m also almost certain that I’ve written these words before, or some very much like them, and conveying the same meaning. Yeah, well, in a few days I’ll be 75; I sometimes forget to zip up my fly; rapid changes in the weather can be crippling. The only good side of growing older is that I was warned over 3 years ago that I might expect to be dead, like, 9 months ago. I’d rather grow older, with all the associated debilitating quirks, than cease to grow older at all and miss all the fun.))

And what fun it is. Almost 60 years ago I had a foreboding that humanity was well on the way to fucking up the planet. In the interim the extent to which they have done so has surpassed my wildest nightmares. But, yeah, whatever. Fortunately an unprecedentedly polarized humanity (at least in my lifetime) is banding together to solve all these problems. (Sarcasm.)

I recently saw a short film of people somewhere in Southeast Asia banding together to clean up a small, slow moving river that was covered in trash – completely invisible beneath this detritus. They succeeded. And their efforts should be applauded, but, really, let’s be realistic. Wishy-washy viewers of this film would likely smile, and mutter a sweet “daaaw”. I, on the other hand, could not help but realize that without some draconian measures to prevent a recurrence, a recurrence there most certainly would be, because people … ooh, that’s a pretty cloud.

“May you live in interesting times.” Well, fuck “interesting times”.